Drive Letter For Tape Drive

I am using a 15/30 GB DLT tape drive in Windows XP Pro. I have the drive configured correctly under device manager and the backup software can use the drive. I am looking for some software that will assign the tape drive a drive letter and allow me to save to the tape drive like an extra drive. Any help or suggestions is apreciated.

Re: Drive Letter For Tape Drive

Did not hear about if this software exists. Tape devices and sequential access devices used for long-term backup storage and it's not convenient to use it as hard disk. Better buy hard disk :o) So another algorythms used to access tapes, different vendors use different ones and different tape layout (only 'tar' the same through all the systems).Please use backup application to back up your dataEugeny

Re: Drive Letter For Tape Drive

The closest thing that comes to mind is HSM (heirarchical storage manager) software. Your data is cached on a disk, and when storage utilization or last modified date thresholds are exceeded the file(s) are moved to tape, leaving behind a pointer.

Most of this sort of software requires a tape library/jukebox of some sort, not just a single drive.

Such software is available from various different vendors (e.g., Veritas, ADIC, Legato), all to fit your budget (or not!).

Re: Drive Letter For Tape Drive

Hi there.We might have just a misunderstanding of the technical kind.A tape drive is a sequential data storage device. That means, one byte saved after another.A disk drive is a direkt access device, where you can store data in any order on blocks with a direkt address.So storing data on a tape directly like to a disk drive is not possible.Today tapes are no more used for sequential access in software like it was years ago on mainfarme computers for sort runs etc.Nowadays they are only used for backup.There is a chance to program something like this special access you need, but i really doubt that there is any software on the market.If there is, please send me some info, because i would be really interested in it.Thank you and kind regardsAlexander M. Ermes

.. and all these memories are going to vanish like tears in the rain! final words from Rutger Hauer in "Blade Runner"

Re: Drive Letter For Tape Drive

Alexander,

Although your understanding of the manner in which a tape drive works is correct, there have been software offerings that establish a drive letter for the tape drive. The tape receives a special 'format' and files can be dragged and dropped to this 'drive letter'. The tape drive still functions in the normal manner, but the user has a clean comprehensible interface to dump files to tape. Additionally, the product Seagate had was very fast, and if one were to open a video file on the tape (double click for example), it would actually read and play as if it were on a hard drive... with the exception of the seek time to get to the file in the first place. Clearly the better the hardware, the better this performance was.

Tapedisk was another product, which apparently stopped development at the windows 95 stage.

Re: Drive Letter For Tape Drive

I don't know about the 15/30gig model, I have an old 2/4 gig DDS-1 drive, and I am using Iomega Flash!File for this.. It's the complete solution. It comes with the Ditto drivers download http://download.iomega.com/english/ditto98.exeInstall it, after the installation of Iomega Backup, You'll find a directory named DTA in the folder you installed it into. Run setup.exe from that directory that is the Flash!File installer.